Convolutional encoding is a method commonly used in telecommunications to make a transmitted signal more robust against perturbations and noise. A convolutional encoder transforms a data stream to be transmitted into a coded data stream having a higher bit rate than the original data stream. An individual bit in the coded data stream may be correlated to two or more bits of the original data stream. Such correlations can be exploited on the receiver side to enable forward error correction.
The Viterbi algorithm is an example of a method of decoding a convolutionally encoded signal and is well-known in the art.